teenth century wore
on, increasingly permeated the East. What, indeed, could be more
provocative of unrest of every description than the resulting
transformation of the Orient--a transformation so sudden, so intense,
and necessitating so concentrated a process of adaptation that it was
basically revolutionary rather than evolutionary in its nature? The
details of these profound changes--political, religious, economic,
social--we have already studied, together with the equally profound
disturbance, bewilderment, and suffering afflicting all classes in this
eminently transition period.

The essentially revolutionary nature of this transition period, as
exemplified by India, is well described by a British economist.[285]
What, he asks, could be more anachronistic than the contrast between
rural and urban India? "Rural India is primitive or mediaeval; city India
is modern." In city India you will find every symbol of Western life,
from banks and factories down to the very "sandwichmen that you left in
the London gutters." Now all this co-exists beside rural India. "And it
is surely a fact unique in economic history that they should thus exist
side by side. The present condition of India does not correspond with
any period of European economic history." Imagine the effect in Europe
of setting down modern and mediaeval men together, with utterly disparate
ideas. That has not happened in Europe because "European progress in the
economic world has been evolutionary"; a process spread over centuries.
In India, on the other hand, this economic transformation has been
"revolutionary" in character.

How unevolutionary is India's economic transformation is seen by the
condition of rural India.

"Rural India, though chiefly characterized by primitive usage, has been
invaded by ideas that are intensely hostile to the old state of things
It is primitive, _but not consistently primitive_. Competitive wages are
paid side by side with customary wages. Prices are sometimes fixed by
custom, but sometimes, too, by free economic causes. From the midst of a
population deeply rooted in the soil, men are being carried away by the
desire of better wages. In short, economic motives have suddenly and
partially intruded themselves in the realm of primitive morality. And,
if we turn to city India, we see a similar, though inverted, state of
things.... In neither case has the mixture been harmonious or the fusion
complete. Indeed, the two orders ar